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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Sunday, November 18, 2001

Hilo airport work annoys residents

By Hugh Clark
Advertiser Big Island Bureau

HILO, Hawai'i — Residents of the Keaukaha Hawaiian Homelands community have been losing sleep over a runway repaving project at the adjacent Hilo Airport that is four months behind schedule.

Their nighttime peace has been disturbed by noise from cargo jets using an alternate runway since the start of the $3.2 million project in June.

Work on the main runway is being done at night so it can be used during the day. The job was to have been finished last month, but now it looks like it won't be done until sometime in February.

Department of Transportation spokeswoman Marilyn Kali said rain delayed the repaving.

Patrick Kahawaiola'a, president of the Keaukaha Community Association, called it a "pretty lame" excuse.

State officials will meet with the community group at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday in the cafeteria of Keaukaha Elementary School. It will be the third such meeting between the two parties since residents first expressed alarm over noise created by use of a shorter, diagonal runway to accommodate nighttime cargo flights.

Kahawaiola'a said the 1,500 members of the coastal community are nearly unanimously opposed to a state proposal to build a mile-long earthen berm to reduce some of the noise causing by landing aircraft. If the area were to suffer a tsunami or fire at one of several fuel storage tanks in the area, "we'd be trapped if we could not escape" over the runway, he said.

There also have been complaints about early morning noise when heavy equipment is moved from the job site and driven up Baker Avenue.

"The timing of this project has been awful. It should have been done at daytime last summer, while the kids were out of school," Kahawaiola'a said.